First Presbyterian Church [Concord]

Title:

First Presbyterian Church

Citation:

Tim Buchman, First Presbyterian Church, Concord, Cabarrus County, Built Heritage of North Carolina: Historic Architecture in the Old North State, North Carolina State University, Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Biography

Hobart Brown Upjohn (1876-1949) was a New York architect who gave North Carolina an extraordinary number of church and educational buildings, nearly 50 in all, and over 40 during the 1920s alone. He was an eclectic architect. This is to say he worked in a variety of historic styles, and sometimes in a mixture of styles, according to the wishes of his clients and the context for which his buildings were intended.

His mother was Emma Degan Tyng (1836-1901), a daughter of an Episcopal clergyman. His father was the famous architect Richard Mitchell Upjohn (1828-1903), designer of many well-known churches and -the Connecticut State Capitol. Richard M. Upjohn was in turn a son of the even more famous Richard Upjohn (1802-1878), an architect who had immigrated to the United States from England as a young man. He helped introduce the Gothic Revival style with his design for Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York (1846) and with his widely read book Upjohn's Rural Architecture (1852), which showed how to apply the new style to small, simple churches and other buildings everywhere.

Hobart Upjohn went to school at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and graduated in 1899 with a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1901, after several short job stints, he became assistant principal of the School of Architecture of the International Correspondence Schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and wrote textbooks on engineering. In 1903 he returned to New York and worked as an engineer for Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz, architect, and Andrew McKenzie, engineer, who had formed one of the first architectural and engineering firms in the United States. While there Upjohn received a letter intended for his father, who had died in 1903, requesting a design for a new church. Upjohn made a design himself, visited the church, and convinced its leaders to hire him. Thus, with his surname and his father's and grandfather's reputations behind him, he opened his own architectural office in 1905.

Upjohn was then twenty-nine years old. Over the next forty years he and his firm produced an array of churches in places as far away as Texas, but primarily in New England, New York State, and New York City, and, of course, in North Carolina. They also designed private houses and buildings for hospitals and schools, including a half-dozen for Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and another half-dozen for St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia. However, nearly a third of his firm's impressive output of around 150 projects was in North Carolina and included virtually all of his best work.

The first phase of his career in North Carolina involved five mainly modest, mainly Episcopal churches between 1908 and 1919. The first commission was for the Church of the Holy Comforter, completed in 1911 in the small railroad and textile manufacturing town of Burlington. The simple stone building, which recalls parish churches of medieval England, stands next to the board-and-batten Church of St. Athanasius, built in 1880 and apparently inspired by a design in Upjohn's grandfather's book Rural Architecture.

His second North Carolina commission came that same year and was for a new Episcopal parish in Wilmington spun off from the older St. James Church there (see Thomas U. Walter). It is the Church of the Good Shepherd, again a simple masonry building in Gothic Revival style.

At about the same time the church in Wilmington was begun, the vestry of Christ Church on Capitol Square in Raleigh offered Upjohn his first major North Carolina commission. It was for the Christ Church Chapel and Parish House next to the existing church, which his grandfather had designed seventy years before just as his Trinity Church in New York was being finished. Hobart Upjohn's chapel and parish house, completed in 1914, make a notably creative and graceful addition to the older building, forming a partly enclosed garden on the north side of the original church, and connecting to it with an arcade that is a copy of the one across the garden that links the old church to its bell tower.

The fourth of Hobart Upjohn's early North Carolina works was in the textile-mill town of Roanoke Rapids. Completed in 1917, All Saints Episcopal Church, like his earlier Episcopal churches in the state, is a modest building, but built this time of wood and clothed in wooden shingles.

In 1918 Upjohn began work on a fifth North Carolina project, but this one was very different from the rest. His previous churches, in North Carolina and elsewhere, had all been in Gothic style, just as the churches of his father and grandfather had been. But now, for the Sprunt Memorial Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, he turned to a new style, the Colonial Revival, which would characterize many of his best designs from then on.

These projects in Burlington, Wilmington, Raleigh, Roanoke Rapids, and Chapel Hill set the stage for Upjohn's larger and more numerous works in North Carolina during the 1920s. They also helped him, a man who formed lasting friendships easily; make the necessary ties to people who would continue to admire him and his work from then on. Each of these early projects had involved one or more of the state's important decision makers. These were men, often Episcopalians, often Presbyterians, who with their wives were part of a closely woven fabric of family and business relationships. By 1920, Upjohn, now forty-four years old, knew or was known by many of them.

His first clients in Burlington included two prominent people with connections to the textile industry, Lawrence and Margaret Erwin Holt, who paid for the Church of the Holy Comforter. Mr. Holt's father Edwin M. Holt had co-founded the early mills, upon which Burlington's economy stood. Mrs. Holt's brother was William Allen Erwin, a member of the Holt family in his own right who had been an executive of the Holt mills and paid for the earlier St. Athanasius. He left Burlington to start a new cotton mill in West Durham in association with the Duke family, and by the time Upjohn arrived in North Carolina the company owned two more mills, one in the town of Duke, now called Erwin, and the other in Cooleemee in Davie County.

William Allen Erwin's wife, Sarah Lyell Smedes, was a daughter of Aldert Smedes, long the principal of St. Mary's School in Raleigh, for whom Hobart Upjohn's grandfather had planned the chapel. Both Mr. and Mrs. Erwin were active Episcopalians, and were later Upjohn's patrons on an important project in Chapel Hill. Edwin Cameron Holt, president of Delgado Cotton Mills in Wilmington, was a nephew of Lawrence Holt of Burlington, and he admired both the Church of the Holy Comforter and its architect. It is likely that it was he who suggested Upjohn to the leaders of St. James Church when the new Church of the Good Shepherd was being contemplated.

A similar connecting thread stretched from Burlington to Raleigh and the venerable Christ Church, whose rector when Upjohn was hired, Milton Augustus Barber, had been the rector in Burlington and worked with him on the Church of the Holy Comforter. Another connection extended from Wilmington to Chapel Hill, where Upjohn's Presbyterian Church was sponsored by the Sprunt family, prominent Wilmington merchants and cotton exporters. And Roanoke Rapids, where Upjohn designed the small All Saints Church, was the fiefdom of another Piedmont industrialist and Episcopalian, Samuel F. Patterson. Patterson came from a distinguished North Carolina family and was born and educated in Winston-Salem. He had begun his business career there before moving to Roanoke Rapids to found and acquire several textile mills.

It was Patterson who hired Upjohn to design the first of his major projects in the 1920s, the Roanoke Rapids Junior-Senior High School. Patterson, who paid for the building, intended it as a demonstration of what a modern school ought to be and also, perhaps, as an emblem of his own enlightened paternalism. Completed in 1921, the large school in Elizabethan Revival style became a nationally recognized model, and it is still proudly in use today.

Upjohn's other major North Carolina projects during the 1920s can be divided into three groups: additions to important old North Carolina churches, new churches, and work for educational institutions.

The historic church additions were in Fayetteville, Tarboro, Wilmington, and Edenton. They were in Gothic or Colonial Revival style depending on the buildings being added to, but in every case their designs responded to changing ideas about what a church should be. A church, previously a worship space and not much more, now included offices and classrooms and sometimes parlors, kitchens, and even gymnasiums.

In all his church additions, as in the earlier parish house and chapel for Christ Church in Raleigh, Upjohn's approach to the buildings he was adding onto varied according to the situation. Calvary Church in Tarboro, a work of the antebellum architect William Percival, is in the middle of a luxuriantly planted churchyard that occupies an entire town block. Upjohn's Calvary Church Cheshire Parish House, completed in 1924, stands off to one side next to a street, linked with a simple arcade that marches toward the church and then subtly and courteously touches it. For the St. James Church Parish House in Wilmington, he designed a Gothic Revival Great Hall, completed in 1924, that fits in snugly next to the 1902 parish house, which stands behind the antebellum church itself.

First Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville dates back to 1816, though the building was gutted in 1831 by a fire which destroyed the whole center of town, then rebuilt several times. Upjohn provided elegant new interiors for the main worship space and two notable additions on the outside: a bold portico in front with tall, thin, square columns that recall Mount Vernon, and a breathtakingly high and slender steeple and spire in the tradition of James Gibbs's St. Martin in the Fields in London. He also added a new parish house. All of these were completed in 1924. By contrast, his parish house next to St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Edenton, completed in 1926, is a model of understatement, a simple, two-story Colonial Revival brick house, as befits a new building added beside the old church and burial ground, the second oldest in North Carolina.

The new church buildings were in Chapel Hill, Pinehurst, Concord, High Point, Wilmington, and Greensboro. Five of them are in Gothic Revival style, and four are Colonial Revival.

Of the Gothic ones, three are lovely variations on the kind of seriously historicizing Gothic work that many other architects were doing at the time. They are the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, completed in 1925 and given by Upjohn's old Holt family connection, William Allen Erwin; First Presbyterian Church in High Point, completed in 1928 (as consulting architect with Harry Barton); and Holy Trinity Church Parish House in Greensboro, the parish house of which was completed in 1922 but the church never built to Upjohn's plans.

An altogether different matter are his last two Gothic churches in North Carolina First Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, completed in 1928, and First Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, also completed in 1928. Both buildings are highly inventive. The church in Wilmington is cleverly composed of three buildings designed in three different styles to give the effect of their having been built in three separate stages. The chapel is Norman, the church is Gothic, and the offices and classrooms are in medieval half-timber. The Presbyterian church in Greensboro, on the other hand, is a loose interpretation of the cathedral at Albi in southern France, which is a fortress-like building made of brick that has little in common with the better known Gothic cathedrals of northern France and those of England. Upjohn's Greensboro version, which is also built of brick, but with modern cast-stone trim, is unexpected for a Presbyterian church in the middle of an American town fabric. Sited on a hill, it has bold, drum-like towers on the entrance façade from which a sympathetically curvaceous set of stairs and terraces tumble down from the entrance towards the naturalistic forms of Fisher Park across the street. It is the most surprising of all Upjohn's designs. It was executed in collaboration with the Greensboro architect Harry Barton. Curiously, though, for all their differences, the churches in Wilmington and Greensboro have almost identical interiors.

All the rest of Upjohn's 1920s churches in North Carolina are in his distinctive version of the Colonial Revival style. The non-denominational Village Chapel in Pinehurst, completed in 1925, is an unusually elegant version of Gibbs's St. Martin in the Fields. In this it is like thousands of other American Protestant churches from colonial times onward. Also in the manner of St. Martin is the exquisitely detailed and beautifully built First Presbyterian Church in Concord, completed in 1927 and arguably Upjohn's finest work in North Carolina or anywhere. It has distinctively low side aisles which flank a high central space lit by clerestory windows. This was a common feature of churches from Roman times onward, but it is almost unheard of in an American Colonial or English Georgian churches, or in later Colonial Revival work. On the outside, the building has the almost eerily elegant, thinned-out proportions that were a stamp of Upjohn's Colonial Revival buildings. Its main doorway, for instance, is of about normal width, but its height is astonishingly exaggerated, as is the very tall, very slender spire. Finally, Upjohn's inventiveness continues to the site plan, where the low side aisles inside the church continue on outside and become open arcades that help enclose a little courtyard between the back of the church and a subsidiary classroom building beyond.

Two other buildings, both in Greensboro, are also in a Colonial Revival style, but they have no towers or spires and thus seem like Greek or Roman temples. Temple Emanuel, completed in 1921, has Upjohn's typically attenuated proportions, strikingly slender columns with no fluting, and beautifully stylized Corinthian capitals. The other Greensboro essay in a similar style and form is Grace Methodist Church, completed in 1926.

The buildings that Upjohn designed for educational institutions in the 1920s were all in some version of his Colonial Revival style, for the growing campuses at the present University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and Salem College.

At the University of North Carolina he designed a new student union, the Graham Memorial Building, in about 1920, but it was not completed until 1931. For North Carolina State University there was an ambitious master plan and a score of actual buildings. Among them is Brooks Hall, built in 1926, originally the library and now a part of the College of Design. It features a graceful portico with columns in a Tower of the Winds order, and it contains a central rotunda topped by a dome. The 8,000 square-foot Chancellor's Residence, completed in 1928, is a brick building with Federal proportions. He also created an ambitious design for Riddick Stadium, which was never realized. For Salem College and Academy in Winston-Salem, Upjohn designed two buildings in a variation of his Colonial Revival style suited to the Moravian heritage of the institution—Salem Academy (1929-1930) and Louisa Wilson Bitting Memorial Dormitory (1930)—using motifs that harmonized with the original Moravian Sisters House (Johann Gottlob Krause) and the local revival of Salem's Moravian architectural traditions by Willard C. Northup and Northup and O'Brien.

All told, Upjohn's 1920s works in North Carolina, including several private houses, came to over forty. This many buildings, many of them distinguished, would be an impressive achievement for any architect during an entire career. It is all the more remarkable for having been done so quickly. In 1930, Upjohn was only 54 years old.

His career still had fifteen more years to run. But his practice, like that of almost all his fellow architects, crashed straight into the solid wall of the Great Depression. Upjohn continued to do a few buildings here and there, to make repairs to existing buildings, and to serve as architectural advisor to Trinity Church in New York. He also served as president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He finally closed his office in 1945, and he died in 1949.

Many early photographs of Upjohn's work and the few drawings and other papers from his office that survive are in the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University. There is also a small collection relating to his work in the New York Public Library. North Carolina State University Libraries Special Collections has a set of his and Harry Barton's drawings for First Presbyterian Church in Greensboro and drawings for some of his works at NCSU. Other drawings remain with owners of the buildings, including some of the churches and the buildings at Salem College and Academy. The only overall treatment of Hobart Upjohn's work is a manuscript in the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University in New York: "Hobart B. Upjohn, An Informal Account as I Remember Him," written in the 1970s by his son Everard M. Upjohn, a professor of art history at Columbia. It includes a list of his works. Photographs and descriptions of Upjohn's individual buildings were frequently published during his lifetime in professional journals. These are catalogued in the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, available online in many libraries.

Edward T. Davis and John L. Sanders, A Romantic Architect in Antebellum North Carolina: The Works of Alexander Jackson Davis (2000).

Note:

After First Presbyterian Church burned, Town and Davis provided a design for its restoration, including the roof truss, which survives in the attic after many changes to the building. Hobart Upjohn designed the steeple and the parish house which were added before 1924.

Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern, A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina (2003).

Marvin A. Brown, Greensboro: An Architectural Record (1995).

C. David Jackson and Charlotte V. Brown, History of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, 1913-1998 (1998).

Note:

Monumental Norman Revival church in Fisher Park suburb, Hobart Upjohn, principal designer, with Harry Barton, local and supervising architect. The church won a price from the North Carolina chapter of the AIA, with Upjohn cited as architect. A partial set of drawings for First Presbyterian Church, mainly plans, by Hobart Upjohn and Harry Barton, is held by Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina. It is in the Albert C. Woodroof, Jr. Papers and Architectural Drawings, 1927 - 1975.

Marguerite E. Schumann, Strolling at State: A Walking Guide to North Carolina State University (1973).

Note:

The Manufacturers' Record (July 21, 1904) announced that S. L. Patterson, commissioner of agriculture, was to open bids on August 2nd for construction of the agriculture building for the N. C. College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. Potential bidders could view plans at the commissioner's office or "at the office of Hook and Sawyer, architects, Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh." This is a recent link with the architects for this prominent building at the university. Patterson Hall is said to have been modeled after the agriculture building at Ohio State University.

Frances Benjamin Johnston and Thomas Tileston Waterman, The Early Architecture of North Carolina (1941).

Note:

Christ Episcopal Church is one of the preeminent surviving churches by Richard Upjohn in America. It has been maintained and expanded over the years, including additions by his grandson, Hobart Upjohn, in the early 20th century and a major renovation in the late 20th century.

Christ Episcopal Church

Title:

Christ Episcopal Church

Citation:

Tim Buchman, Christ Church, Raleigh, Wake County, Built Heritage of North Carolina: Historic Architecture in the Old North State, North Carolina State University, Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Burton F. Beers and Murray Scott Downs, North Carolina State University: A Pictorial History (1986).

Catherine W. Bishir, North Carolina Architecture (1990).

Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern, A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina (2003).

Elizabeth C. Waugh, North Carolina's Capital, Raleigh (1967).

Note:

Originally called Main Building, the building opened for students in the fall of 1889 and, for a short time, was the only building on campus. It was subsequently named for Alexander Quarles Holladay, the first president of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, now North Carolina State University. In 1928, the building underwent extensive renovations under the supervision of Hobart Upjohn. Holladay Hall still serves as the main administration building of the university.

Church of the Holy Comforter

Title:

Church of the Holy Comforter, Burlington, Alamance

Citation:

Church of the Holy Comforter, Burlington, Alamance County, Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards (P077), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

First Presbyterian Church

Title:

First Presbyterian Church

Citation:

Tim Buchman, First Presbyterian Church, Concord, Cabarrus County, Built Heritage of North Carolina: Historic Architecture in the Old North State, North Carolina State University, Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Roanoke Rapids Junior-Senior High School

Roanoke Rapids Junior-Senior High School, Roanoke Rapids, Halifax County, Built Heritage of North Carolina: Historic Architecture in the Old North State, North Carolina State University, Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

First Presbyterian Church

Title:

First Presbyterian Church, Wilmington, New Hanover County

Citation:

First Presbyterian Church, Wilmington, New Hanover County, Built Heritage of North Carolina: Historic Architecture in the Old North State, North Carolina State University, Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Marguerite E. Schumann, Strolling at State: A Walking Guide to North Carolina State University (1973).

Note:

The building opened in 1925 as Thompson Gymnasium and became the first indoor athletic facility at North Carolina State University. Until the opening of Reynolds Coliseum, it hosted intercollegiate basketball games. It was renovated and renamed Thompson Theater in 1963 and, following another comprehensive renovation in 2009, the name was changed to Thompson Hall.

The large brick building was erected in the form of a textile mill for present NC State University's textile school, with brick walls, large arched windows, and heavy timber framing and plank floors. After most of the building was destroyed by fire on March 24, 1914, it was rebuilt immediately in the old walls; a central tower added during the rebuilding was later removed. Tompkins Hall was subsequently renovated in 1924 (supervised by Hobart Upjohn), in 1939 (under the direction of Ross Edward Shumaker) and in 1981.

Tompkins Hall

Title:

Tompkins Hall

Citation:

Tompkins Hall, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, Wake County, University Archives Photograph Collection, North Carolina State University, Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Becton Hall, together with Berry Hall, the earlier Bagwell Hall (1925, see Hobart Upjohn) and the Honors Village Commons Building (2005), forms the Honors Village on the North Carolina State University campus. Its construction was financed by the Public Works Administration after the Great Depression.

Becton Hall

Title:

Becton Hall, Raleigh, Wake County

Citation:

Becton Hall, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, Wake County, University Archives Photograph Collection, North Carolina State University, Libraries, Special Collections Research Center, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Berry Hall, together with Becton Hall, the earlier Bagwell Hall (1925, see Hobart Upjohn) and the Honors Village Commons Building (2005), forms the Honors Village on the North Carolina State University campus. Its construction was financed by the Public Works Administration after the Great Depression.

Further research is required to ascertain the authorship of this substantial dormitory. It has been credited to Nelson and Cooper with the original section described as built in 1916 plus additions in 1922, which have been cited to Hobart Upjohn. It is unlikely that Nelson or Nelson and Cooper were involved in the 1916 portion, since their partnership was not formed until 1920 or 1921, and there is no record of Nelson's presence in Raleigh as early as 1916.